When Hamlet complains that Guildenstern 'would pluck out the heart of [his] mystery, ' he imagines an encounter that recurs insistently in the discourses of early modern England. The struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart is rehearsed not only in plays bu…
"The self has a history. In the West, the idea of the soul entered Christianity with the Church Fathers, notably Augustine. During the Renaissance the idea of the individual attained preeminence, as in the works of Montaigne. In the seventeenth century, philosophers such as Desc…
When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature o…
When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature o…
Shelley's detractors since Hazlitt have noticed a division in the 'self' of his poems. A central reasoning core fears the passions surrounding it and distrusts the language expressing it. A few of his admirers offer an alternative view of the poems as symbolical pointers to a no…
This collection of essays focuses on a crucial aspect of late antique thought and literature that has hitherto largely been neglected: its self-reflexivity, i.e. its unprecedented ability to make language and literature into its main and often its only subject matter. Adopting a…
This is a challenging theory of Whitman's poetics of possession and his understandings of individual and national identity. The author reads his works in relation to 19th-century theories of sexual desire, poetic inspiration and political representation.
